


soak you to the bone

by crackthesky



Category: The Witcher (TV)
Genre: Angst, Drunkenness, Grief/Mourning, Hurt No Comfort, Multi, Parental Death, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, cruelty while drunk, mention of vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-30
Updated: 2020-03-30
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:55:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23385592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crackthesky/pseuds/crackthesky
Summary: sometimes, grief can make you cruel.  sometimes, it’s easier to hurt instead of be hurt.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Reader
Comments: 6
Kudos: 35





	soak you to the bone

“You’re drunk,” Geralt says, softer than you’d like.

“Mhmm.”

The wine has left you hazy, flows tacky through your veins and burns warm beneath your skin. You tilt your head back, feel the faintest kiss of pain as the back of your skull hits the wall behind you. The sting of it is veiled, shrouded by the wine. It doesn’t matter. There’s pain anyway, growing like brambles around your ribs, sinking thorns deep between the gaps in the bones. It stings even through the cotton wrapped around you, bleeds through the bandage of the alcohol.

Geralt is at the threshold of your room. He hovers ghostlike, at the edge of your world and lost with no map. He’s wispy at the edges, the white of his hair like rolling fog, bleeding and blurring as you blink against the saltwater of your tears. A specter all your own.

_Am I not haunted enough _, you think, the thought rising from the murky deep. Your head feels like a stone dropped into a pond. Sinking, too heavy to keep up. There’s a hollow little thud, and you realize that you’ve banged your skull against the wall again. Your head spins, the world tilting, and you close your eyes, shut them tight against the whirl of it all.__

____

____

Cloth rustles. 

You open your eyes to meet Geralt’s gaze. His golden eyes flicker over you like sparks from a forge, pricking against you. He’s hunkered down in front of you. The space between the two of you is a chasm, the thin bridge of hard-won affection that crosses it wavering with uncertainty. Through the veil of the wine, you watch his hands flex into fists, knuckles whitening, and then relax again. 

You know he wants to touch you. Have learned to recognize the hesitation that comes before his fingertip traces across your skin. He looks small like this, somehow, like a predator caught in a steel trap meant for something else, something bigger.

“What is it?” he asks, each word slow. You know what it has cost him to string even that simple question together. 

It’s _skin cooling against yours; the slack of her mouth; the way her fingers droop even with yours wound between them; it’s the sobbing swelling in you and the way ‘mother’ slips from your lips like a tide; how that tide of ‘mother’ crashes against her empty shore over and over, waves breaking upon the shell of her, like you can call her back and tuck her into her body again because you are still so young and you need the home of her; it’s the way something in you goes cold, cold, cold_. It is all of those things and more, but you cannot find the words, cannot dredge them out of the sludge of wine, and so you don’t.

Instead -

“I saw her face in the mirror,” you tell him. You curl up like a fern, pull your knees to your chest. “Her face instead of mine, something hazy and sharp, pieces of her stitched together in my likeness, in my form. I have her mouth, you know.”

“I know,” Geralt says, and the unusual tenderness in him makes you wild inside, makes something mad in you throw itself against the jagged cliffs that rise high in your chest. There is heat streaking down your cheeks, and you realize that you are crying, tears trickling unsteadily against your skin.

“I want all of her, every piece I can have, want to swallow it down and build her again between my ribs,” you rasp, the words slurring together. “I want all of her. Even the pieces that were never mine to begin with. But I still want to be me, too. It hurts so terribly.”

Vaguely, you realize that the keening, animal whine that is filling the room is spilling from you. Geralt’s hands flutter just shy of your skin, like moths circling light. A sob claws its way out of your throat. It tears merciless from you, rasps against your throat and slides bitter against your tongue, and then you cannot stop it. You heave and shake apart into the wine’s tender, sour grasp, its fingers closing around your chest until you are drowning in your own tears.

Geralt does not touch you. You feel the gap between his hovering fingers and your skin like a void, a canyon yawning between you. You want to push into his touch; you’ve grown used to it. In the few months you’ve spent together, it’s become a common thing, the brush of his hand against yours, or the press of your lips against his collarbone. The Witcher has let you peek between the gaps in his shield. There is something delicate between you, each of you treading careful and slow in new territory. 

“I know,” Geralt says again, but you can see the uncertainty. “It will pass, as all emotions do.”

Something ugly starts to unwind in you.

“What do you know of emotion, Witcher,” you snarl, the words ripping from somewhere deep inside you, from the feral little creature that’s been curled inside you with its teeth sunk deep, deep, deep, cracking the bones of your ribcage until it aches to take even the shallowest of breaths, “you have none.”

You are drunk, you know, but there is clarity in cruelty. Wine has always given you sharp teeth. And you have always known where to sink them in.

“Grief is just a word to you,” you hiss. “Just a word, a jumble of letters on a page that you pretend to understand.”

Geralt’s expression doesn’t change, but suddenly - suddenly he is closed off like a shuttered window, wood over delicate glass, solid instead of opaque, a void where the soft light used to spill from him. 

He rises to his feet without a word. He lingers for a moment, stays in place near you, but you cannot find it in you to apologize, can feel the anger and the grief buzzing in you like a wasp’s nest and know you will only continue to sting.

The door clicks shut behind Geralt.

You rest your forehead against your knees and sob. You can taste the wine where it coats your tongue like oil, sweet and dry and roiling in your stomach. It will come up soon, you know, will spill from your mouth as bile, dark from the rot it absorbed in you. 

That ugly thing purrs. It is satisfied now, free from where you’d trapped it when it first gnawed and snarled at the idea of caring for someone new.

_Apologize in the morning _, you think. Find words for the terror of letting him close, the terror of gaining someone else to lose.__

____

____

Beneath the wine’s fog, some part of you whispers that there are things that apologies can’t heal.

You crawl to bed. 

You wake in the morning with stones in your head, rumbling against each other every time you shift. It’s like a sword beating against a shield. By the time you stumble down the stairs of the inn, nausea brewing low in your stomach, breakfast is half-done. You glance around before you settle into a seat with a greasy sausage and a thick hunk of bread.

The bread settles your stomach, just slightly, and you stay seated, your bleary gaze wandering the room. You idly toy with a small dagger, sharply honed by Geralt’s steady hand, gouging the point into the thick wood of the table.

Finally, you find the courage to ask the innkeeper the question you already know the answer to. And you are right.

Geralt left in the night.

_It’s fine_ , you think, packing up your saddlebags. If you unconsciously leave space for the few things Geralt has you carry, it’s not as if he will ever know. _It’s fine_ , you think again, shouldering one of your bags and stepping out into the empty hallway.

“It’s fine,” you tell yourself as you push coin to the innkeeper, who raises a brow but keeps his mouth shut.

You step out of the inn and into the sunlight. The road is bustling, merchants with their full carts and children darting about between the houses that line the street. You turn to Geralt to point out the herbalist’s cart, piled high with herbs - you can just see a tuft of white flowers that you know he is running low on - and stop. You take a deep breath and turn away from the empty space behind you, and orient yourself towards your next destination. Each step makes something in you rattle.

The crowded main road has never felt so empty.

**Author's Note:**

> witchernonsense over on tumblr posted these [prompts](https://witchernonsense.tumblr.com/post/612291298769190912/the-horror-and-the-wild-album-lyrics-as) a while back and the ‘reader drunk and sobbing over loss, Geralt utterly unsure of how to approach’ caught me but i left it alone for a bit. and then i came back to it. and immediately deviated a bit.
> 
> sometimes we are cruel to those we love, or are afraid to love, and i don't know why but i wanted to portray it. why i am being mean to geralt, who deserves such kindness after all the cruelty he's already endured? i don't know. 
> 
> title is from the amazing devil’s ‘welly boots’ (because leave it to me to be prompted by a specific lyric and then use another lyric from a different song)
> 
> please be a lil bit gentle with me on this one, folks.


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